Rude awakening

Sir Jonathon Porritt has spent more than three decades highlighting green issues, from the 'in-yer-face' days with Friends of the Earth to advising today's government. He tells John Vidal why, now, capitalism is the agent of change

The Energy Clinic in London E1 sounds like a place that gives advice on boilers and double glazing. Anything but. It's where stressed corporates go to sip "rejuvenating" tea with their personal energy advisers, assess their "qi" life force, and get herbal face masks. It is also where the government's sustainable development chief, Sir Jonathon Porritt, last week spoke to a group of 40 senior British Airports Authority managers about the environment. After the talk, which made the point that BAA could make far more money by taking care of nature, the managers seemed relieved, even surprised, that the former Green party figurehead and Friends of the Earth (FoE) director did not bite their ankles and stamp on their heads for developing Terminal 5 at Heathrow, for fighting for night flights and for encouraging air travel and mass consumerism.

"Porritt's style is passionate but rational," said one. "He does not threaten, but cajoles us," said another. A third said he made "complete sense". A fourth told him he was responsible for her getting involved in corporate social responsibility. Whether BAA changes its policies is another thing.

Porritt, sometime adviser and confidant to the government, the Prince of Wales, Tesco and almost every major business executive, lives now in the netherworld between corporate power, consumer activism, the civil service and the young guns of the Forum for the Future, the charity he set up with colleague Sarah Parkin in 1995. Since he returned from the Rio Earth summit in 1992, he has cajoled a generation of business people to become - in their own fields - as radical as the early Green party or FoE activists.

To underline what he has learned, he has written a book called Capitalism As If the World Matters. It's no contrarian potboiler, but it will shock some people because its stark premise is that capitalism is the only global force able to get the world out of its present deep troubles.

His argument is pragmatic and goes briefly like this: it is impossible to deny the need for profound change in the face of today's ecological crises; the pace of change is not sufficient, and conventional environmentalism has failed to win over hearts and minds; change has to be desirable and will not come by threatening people with ecological doom; therefore, we must embrace capitalism as the only overarching system capable of both reconciling ecological sustainability, and reforming it. More to the point, he says, "we don't have time to wait for any big-picture ideological successor".

It has taken 30 years of heart-searching to distill that, but Porritt insists that he is not complacent. "I don't have great faith in capitalism, but it is formidably flexible," he says. "It is potent, able to recreate itself in many forms. I also feel that there are enough capitalists who feel passionately that they don't want to see their system disappear. But this is a last- chance-saloon job. If you leave through the wrong door your passion for capitalism is finished."

Tooth and claw

He also knows that capitalism in 30 years has created most of the problems it is now charged with solving, and that what is emerging in China may be something even redder in tooth and claw than what has been seen before. "My one concern is that India and China are already so indoctrintated," he says. "The majority may have been suborned by exposure to western-driven media messages."

It also worries him that it is the very few leading the very many. "There is an elite of unreconstructed, vicious capitalists for whom the process of accumulation is so powerful ... a tiny group controls so much leverage, and people are in thrall to this minuscule group." Porritt is not naming names, but the present US government is clearly high on the list. "Bush is inexplicable," he says. "He is the product of a 20-year experiment in neo-liberal economics ... you can see [what is happening in the US] as a last gasp, a total discredit to the system. There is a massive momentum that is very difficult to break. I am under no illusions. It is a dominant system that has taken control over leverages of power. But I am convinced that we have reached the outer extremity of the pendulum and that it's coming back. Whether we come back fast enough is another matter."

He argues that, given the right incentives, capitalism can and will transform itself to deliver a genuinely sustainable economy. "There is nothing about the system that says it cann't change," he says. "At different points in history, corporations have not been such a destructive entity."

Equally, there was a time when green campaigners would snort with contempt at the very idea that capitalism could be enlisted in the business of saving the planet. Today, Porritt says, business is far ahead of government, and a new breed of campaigners in and out of the boardrooms are working together. He says: "Business is now driving government, telling it: 'Please sort this out.' Perhaps 10 years ago I would have put the burden on business. Now it's on politicians."

But government is needed, he says, "because there will always be more opportunity to make money out of undermining the environment than protecting it".

He finds Labour "disappointing", but he qualifies that. "This was - and is - a government that could have made much more important interventions. I look at reductions in child poverty, improvements in health services and schools. There are clear benefits. I celebrate that, genuinely. This government has done a huge amount on social issues, but it is so nervous, tentative [on other things] ... It hasn't handled the environment well. It just hasn't understood the agenda. They don't feel seized by it. They have done some good things, especially with rural economies, but they have fallen far short on things like transport and sustainable energy. The bit that really pisses me off is when it's easy ..." He gives the example of new housing and says it would have been - and still is - easy to ramp up the building standards to encourage energy conservation and sustainable energy.

Part of the problem, he says, may be in the civil service. "There are still cultures of caution and mediocrity inside the civil service," he says. "They don't like society entrepreneurs, people who are genuinely bringing solutions."

What he regrets most about his activist days in the 1970s is that the green movement never fully capitalised on the energy price shocks. Had it done so, he says, life would be different today. "We are having to relearn it. We can't miss the chance now. We live in an oil-scarce, carbon-curtailed world that will revolutionise society."

What revolutionised him was the Earth summit. "I was a tired activist. When I left FoE in 1991, I was uncertain how to take the thing forward. Then I went to Rio. It was a revelation. This amazing group of people ... women, religions, activists. 'Bloody hell,' I thought, 'all these people are up for something different.'"

Insane ideas

He finds it amazing that the radical ideas of the 70s are now part of mainstream politics. When people talked then of the greenhouse effect or the need for recycling, they were told they were insane. "There was contempt for anyone who took that set of political beliefs," he recalls.

So what are today's equally heretical ideas? Porritt does not hesitate. "It is the carbon-constrained world," he says. By this he means that everything in the future, because of climate change, will have to be assessed and valued by its carbon content, and that the world will have to adapt to life without emissions.

"In my day, people felt overwhelmed by anger and passion at what was happening to the world. I have learned that anger is not very helpful, but I can't help myself. If I am surrounded by businesspeople who are in denial or complacent, I can't help the anger bubbling out."

This is Porritt's third incarnation. He spent 10 years with the Greens, 10 years with FoE - "a very confrontational, in-yer-face time" - and, since then, has "been looking for answers" for 10 years or more. So what next? He replies: "Maybe in three or four years ... I see myself on [a] more spiritual side ... It's not a retreat. I think of it as [becoming] a spiritual activist."

Meanwhile, he says, people working on the inside for the transformation of world capitalism "still need the ankle-biters. It's important to have people who hurt."

Thinking out loud

Quotes from Jonathon Porritt's new book

Reform agenda

"The notion of 'capitalism as if the world mattered' demands a reform agenda, not a revolutionary one. But it requires a different level of engagement and a much greater readiness to confront denial, to challenge the slow, soul-destroying descent into displacement consumerism, and to take on today's dominant 'I consume, therefore I am' mindsets and lifestyles."

Corporate scandals

"We have just come through what must have been one of the most spectacularly debauched periods of unfettered profit maximisation since the 19th century, culminating in a sequence of corporate scandals and collapses that has contributed to the pendulum starting to swing back from its neo-liberal extreme. Sustainable capitalism needs to find ways of limiting the concentration of wealth."

Irresistible force

"Like it or not, capitalism is the only game in town. The drive to extend the reach of markets into every aspect of the economy is an irresistible force."

Greatest threat

"The combination of aggressive unilateralism in pursuit of a new American imperium, an unprecedentedly radical application of neo-conservative economic policies, and the mind-boggling adherence of Americans to ... religious fundamentalism poses ... the greatest threat to the prospect of sustainable development becoming the dominant political framework."

· Capitalism As If The World Matters, is published by Earthscan, price £18.99

Career history 1974-84; English and drama teacher, Burlington Danes comprehensive; 1984-90: director, Friends of the Earth; 1990-present: author and broadcaster; writer and presenter: Where On Earth Are We Going? (BBC) How To Save The World (Channel 4); 1996-present: co-founder and programme director, Forum for the Future.